#81: Raising Hare

 

Raising Hare is Chloe Dalton’s account of finding a leveret on a path near her house in the country, taking it home (after initially leaving it alone for four hours to let it move away or be reclaimed by its mother) and rearing it.

This is, initially, against advice. A conservationist tells her he has never heard of anyone successfully raising a leveret. A friend advises her to give it to someone who knows about animals. But, says Dalton, ‘… I felt an inner stubbornness stirring. I will work it out.’

What do hares eat?

Dalton knows little about raising hares and soon finds out most advice is about cooking and eating them, not feeding them. She eventually finds out what to feed the leveret in Cowper’s poem ‘Epitaph on a Hare’, written after the death of one of his three pet hares:

His diet was of wheaten bread,
And milk, and oats, and straw,
Thistles, or lettuces instead,
With sand to scour his maw.

On twigs of hawthorn he regaled,

On pippins’ russet peel;

And, when his juicy salads failed,

Sliced carrot pleased him well.

This hare refuses carrot and lettuce, but oats prove a long-term favourite, along with clover and grass from the garden:

It adored clover and would bury itself in the deepest patches, until only the tips of its ears could be seen, foraging freely for the plants that it had spurned when I cut them, preferring to crop them fresh from the ground.… Grass it would eat from the tip of the blade down to the stem, flowers the reverse. It would snap dandelions off at the root and gradually draw the stem into its mouth until the vivid yellow petals hovered at its muzzle, whereupon it would neatly sever the flower head and let it fall by its paws.

Such close observation and description of the hare’s appearance and habits was for me the main strength of the book. Here, for example, is the arrival of the hare’s winter pelt:

At year’s end, its coat was russet-coloured, almost flame-like in the sunset light. Its face bore prominent white markings: a beautiful pale circle around each eye, with an additional patch of white above and below it, presumably intended to break up the dark shape of the face when seen against the snow. Just as when it was small, its rear legs and lower haunches were once again a pale milky-coffee hue. At dusk, these streaks and patches of white would remain visible while the rest of its body disappeared in the fading light.

Dalton’s familiarity with the hare is shown by linking its winter coat to the pelt of its youth, and her sensitivity to its surroundings and habits by describing how the pelt appears in the light and against the snow.

Citizen research?

I can’t help feeling such description may be of use to scientists, and indeed Dalton once or twice finds the hare’s behaviour at odds with what she’s read in scientific papers; for example Dalton reads that hares are absentee parents, but when leverets arrive (showing the hare to be female), she is an attentive mother:

The hare remained close by throughout the day, ensuring that the leverets stayed undercover while keeping an eye out for predators. On several occasions I watched her lunge fearlessly at crows that came too close, wielding her front legs like a battering ram and successfully chasing them off her territory, despite their larger size and formidable beaks.

She also finds she feeds her young more often than asserted in various studies.

Other things one learns in the book is how hares run and leap; that they build ‘forms’, shallow grass-filled grooves in the earth, rather than burrowing underground like rabbits; and they strongly dislike changes in their environment, as when Dalton disposes of an old sofa, then has to reinstate it after the hare is unsettled.

The sofa question leads gently onto Dalton asking herself whether she should enclose the garden, which would deprive other gambolling hares of their playground, then to a wider comment on all the human barriers to animal roaming, and information that many hares may cover 9-12 miles of ground per night to feed. Gentle seguing from personal observation, to questioning, to factual information is another strength of the writing.

Helping hares

There is also a plea for a closed season on hunting hares (amazingly, there is none at the moment), and information that they are often killed by farm machinery, since leverets defend themselves by hunkering down and staying still rather than running to escape, which makes them particularly vulnerable. A chapter called ‘Blood in the Harvest’ recommends using drones to detect the animals so often harmed through agriculture:

If it is possible to create robots and drones to reap our fields for us, could we not use technology to detect the presence of leverets, and fauns, and nesting birds, and could reasonable efforts not be made to relocate them, rather than simply leaving them to be crushed beneath our machines?

Raising Hare is (thankfully) mostly free from any ‘journey’ of personal development on the part of the author, although she does describe how being with the hare made her question her often frenetic life as a foreign policy specialist. The book’s core is her experience and observation of the hare, and any wider exploration is based on and grows out of this close observation and description. The hare’s pace of behaviour permeates the writing; the book takes its time on description, is not overly concerned to form a narrative and trusts the reader to try to enter into the hare’s texture of life.

Raising Hare is published by Canongate.